The problem is a result of a hardware classification correction combined with a lack of foresight on the part of the classifier. In Mandriva 2007 Free, my four IDE burners are incorrectly detected as SCSI devices and named sda, sdb, sdc, and sdd, while my eight IDE drives are correctly detected and named hde, hdf, hdg, hdh, hdi, hdj, hdk, and hdl. But in Mandriva 2008, some well meaning contributor decides to correct Mandriva's IDE device detection. So my four IDE burners are detected as hda, hdb, hdc, and hdd. My first four hard drives are detected as hde, hdf, hdg, and hdh. But my other four IDE hard drives are completely ignored. And as luck would have it, my Mandriva 2007 Spring Free is installed on drive hdi. So I am out of luck again. (A few words of explanation do seem to be called for. I use my computer's IDE0 for my four burners. I use two identical Promise TX2 PATA133 IDE Controller cards for the eight IDE hard drives.) Previously, when I tried to install Mandriva 2008-RC, the problem was that the RC version failed to support either Promise IDE PCI controller card and a kernel panic ensued when no hard drives could be found.

That sounds familiar, 2700.1 had a similar issue with my SATA drives. They are on the same controller but for some reason Mandriva saw only the first two no matter what I tried. I had the impression that it failed to separate between master and slave so that it saw only the master drives (technically, SATA doesn't have master vs slave but I was running them in IDE mode). Have you checked whether the four hard drives are on the same card or whether they are really the four master drives? Have you considered switching your OS drive to the detected controller? I know of a few cases where the installer failed to detect one or more drives that eventually did pop up as soon as the OS was installed.